David Pedrick

July 27, 2026

Listen (3:50)

American professional musicians today sit in a strange statistical fog, somewhere between official labor categories and the gig economy’s shadows, but the scale is still enormous: federal and industry estimates suggest well over 150,000–170,000 people…

Listen (2:20)

July 20, 2026

AI-generated music may be approaching market saturation, and the reason for that is simple: the novelty has worn off. What once looked like a disruptive breakthrough now, in many corners of the industry, looks like…

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July 13, 2026  

There has been a progress, of sorts, in Mozart scholarship over the past couple of years. In September 2024, researchers in Leipzig made a fascinating discovery in a previously unknown string trio from the composer's…

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July 6, 2026  


An American Citizen

520 Chestnut Street (exterior park bench)

Philadelphia, PA 19106  

Thomas Paine, Esq.

Care of Madame Bonneville

Columbia Street, Greenwich

Near New-York  

Monday, 6 July, 2026  

Dear Mr. Paine,

I write to you…

Listen (:39)  

June 29, 2026  


I’m still of the mind that reaching the halfway point of the year is a good time to reflect on the books that have influenced, shaped, and highlighted the past twenty-six weeks. This is my…

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June 22, 2026

Unpaged

discontented,
circumvented,
whistling past the graveyard,
collecting words that weigh more than they burn.

apprehension,
surface tension,
consorting with the lost,
sequestering the lines I failed to learn.

bought low (it seemed like a…

Listen (2:40)

June 15, 2026  

Magna Carta, sealed on June 15, 1215, at Runnymede, mapped in the charter as a water-meadow along the River Thames in Surrey between Windsor and Staines, was born of a time of tension, as…

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June 8, 2026

World Ocean Day is an annual international observance held on June 8th that celebrates the ocean’s importance to life on Earth and encourages action to protect marine ecosystems. It was first proposed in 1992 at…

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June 1, 2026  

There was a time, not necessarily a happier or better-informed one, when music journalism was a thing. The halcyon days, when there was a trusted, blind-bake relationship among musicians and listeners, and the writer was…

Listen (1:08)

May 24, 2026

Lingua Franca  

when it’s late or dark or dusk  
or in ambient light,
when you get caught in the rain,  
wringing out your possibilities,
being poor on purpose, catastrophic  
as a last-minute cassoulet,
insufferably loud…